Erich Neiderhoffer
Erich Neiderhoffer was a German philosopher, economist, and reformer. He was the most influential of the crisis philosophers of the late nineteenth century. Neiderhoffer wished to replace the aristocratic society of Europe with a more egalitarian one that better reflected the realities of life under the capitalist system. He called for the gradual purchase of factories by their workers so that "no one would be an exploiter, everyone would be an exploiter." Neiderhoffer's ideas can be traced back to the leaders of the North American Rebellion, particularly the Declaration of Independence, Common Sense, the last letters of Samuel Adams and John Adams, and the Apologia of Thomas Jefferson. One of the national leaders whose ideas were influenced by Neiderhoffer was Léon Gambetta, who formed a socialist government in Paris during the French Revolution. Gambetta called for the distribution of equity ownership in France's industries to the workers, and the expropriation of unused private and church lands, to be distributed to farmers. In the Confederation of North America in the early 1880s, the People's Coalition called for a version of Neiderhofferism: a guaranteed wage for workers, governmnet support for farm prices, and "solidarity with our brothers across the seas," meaning with the French revolutionaries. By the time the P.C. came to power in Burgoyne in 1888, Ezra Gallivan had largely made the party over into a middle-class movement of intellectuals and workers. However, there were those within the P.C. who meant to transform the C.N.A. into some kind of Niederhofferian society, and these party members viewed Gallivan with scorn for having obtained power without intending to use it. By contrast, when Gallivan stated in his inaugural address that "New means must be found for the people to . . . share more fully in the profits their work made possible," his opponents assumed that Gallivan meant to introduce Neiderhofferian economics, which would destroy the confidence of the business class. Gallivan responded by making it clear that he never considered Neiderhofferism the answer to the country's problems. By the early 1920s, a new generation of radicals and reformers had arisen in the C.N.A. who considered the Neiderhofferians irrelevant. Instead of calling for greater equality within the capitalist system, they rejected urbanization and industrialization, which they called "the suffocation of the cities and the horrors of the factory," and called for a return to "a more natural way of life." Late in 1920, these anti-urbanists had gained control of Howard Washburne's League for Brotherhood. Thus, the reform movement of the early 1920s simultaneously included Ivan Falls of the Agrarian Alliance, who demanded a limit to the size of cities and a return to the soil, and Fred Harcourt of the Workers' Army, who called for Neiderhofferian reforms. ---- Sobel's sources for the life and work of Erich Neiderhoffer are Neiderhoffer's own My People, My Life (London, 1890), as well as Harvey Forrest's collection Philosophers of Crisis (London, 1958), Malcolm Hershkovitz's Socialists and Society (New York, 1960), Robert Grady's The Age of Neiderhoffer (New York, 1965), and Frank Wilkerson's Reaping the Whirlwind: The Crisis Philosophers of the Late Nineteenth Century (London, 1970). Neiderhoffer, Erich